USA > Massachusetts > Berkshire County > Stockbridge > Stockbridge, 1739-1939; a chronicle > Part 15
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Chapter IX
GOING OUT INTO THE WORLD
A T the beginning of the nineteenth century, Stock- bridge's early youth had passed. The self-conscious age had not yet arrived. Up to this time distinguished visitors had merely commented rather prosaically upon the pleasant scenery. "The lands are good and well cultivated and the plain well covered with settlements," wrote William Laughton Smith. Madam Dwight showed surprise when her young guest, Eliza Quincy, went into raptures over the view from her window. She had been too busy rearing children and wresting an uncomfortable living out of the wilderness to notice things like that.
For the main part, life was still lived simply in the patri- archal style. Yet, insidiously, the outer world was creeping in. It had taken fourteen days for Theodore Sedgwick's letters from Philadelphia to reach the Berkshires and when the roads were bad he was ten days getting home. In 1807, the Stockbridge Turnpike was completed and a stage ran through the village, at first three times a week and then every day, stopping for a rest and change of horses at the Red Lion Inn. An advertisement in The Pittsfield Sun appeared in the form of a dialogue:
"How much is the stage fare from Lee, Lenox, or Stock- bridge on to Hudson?"
"$1.75 from either place."
"How often do you run?"
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"Every day except Sunday."
"Where do you dine?"
"At Hicks' in Stockbridge coming up and at Hillsdale going down."
Though communication with the world beyond the hills was easier, it had little adulterating effect upon the solid village core. Stockbridge even then was self-derivative, expressing a definite personality of its own. Entrenched in its seniority, it could look down its nose at Pittsfield, whose rapid industrial growth seemed only a sign of vulgar pros- perity, and it considered Lenox a dreary little upstart of a town.
The younger generation of the early 1800's who attended the Elm Street school, wove the village into a loose network of relationships and, as the nineteenth century wore on, their lives blended into the life and growth of the village, so that the two patterns are inextricably intertwined.
In the two-room schoolhouse, the older scholars studied upstairs while the lower room was kept for younger children. In 1828, the upper school was incorporated into Stockbridge Academy, with Jared Curtis in charge; and in 1833 a new schoolhouse was put up where the present one now stands. In early spring, pools of water surrounded the building and children had to wade to their lessons as best they could. Nevertheless, this was the most important educational center in the town. The East Street school up on the hill in the northeastern district, remained its unsophisticated country neighbor. In the northwestern district, even the little red schoolhouse, where John Bacon and Stephen West had had their controversies, had to play second fiddle. Though the East Street school, opposite Oak Lawn, boasted only one room, it kept a very careful record of its doings. Pupils outside the Stockbridge line were admitted on the payment of a dollar fee. Wood for the fireplace, supplied by the
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lowest bidder, was cut and split on the first day of July of each year, and piled neatly in the woodhouse by the first of October. Parents paid Prentiss Bliss the sum of one dollar annually for fixing the fires. Teachers' salaries varied, according to their sex. Maria Brown was paid $5.10 a month, while John O'Brien at $11.50 did considerably better. Measures to keep up their morale were not wanting, and the most elaborate of progressive schools could hardly be more tactful: "The prosperity of this school depends very much upon the course pursued by the friends and parents of the children at home and . . . the utmost caution should be observed to do or say nothing in a manner likely to come to the ears of such children as to injure the reputation of their teacher."
ยท Interest in schools was keen enough to create a society for their improvement. Committees of three persons in each district were appointed to visit and report upon the progress of the pupils, the condition of the schoolhouse, the interest of the parents in the school, and whether expenses were to be defrayed by private subscription or public appropriation. In 1832, $800 was appropriated for schools; in 1840, $1,000, and in 1860, $1,200.
Education was but part of the duty life held for children, only a part of the serious pattern of their lives. To Archibald and Mary Hopkins's sons it was an interlude between plough- ing and mowing. The Sedgwick boys had to drive the cows to pasture before they went to their lessons. Theodore had definite responsibilities. "You will see that the lambs are taken care of and tell the men they must go to plowing as soon as possible," wrote his father.
What did they learn, these serious children? A pamphlet, entitled The Literary Repository, and published for the use of schools, gives a list of dates that were considered essential, solidifying the universe into an orthodox mold:
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Creation, 4004 B. C. The Deluge, 2348 B. C. Babel built, 2347 B. C. Moses born, 1671 B. C.
Destruction of Troy and Rape of Helen, 1184 B. C.
"Our minds were not weakened by too much study," wrote Catherine Sedgwick. "Reading, spelling, and Dwight's Geography were the only paths of knowledge into which we were led . . . I did go in a slovenly way through the first four rules of arithmetic, and learned the names of the several parts of speech, and could parse glibly."
Schooling may have been elementary; reading at home was not. Literature had no middlemen in those days and the classics or nothing fed an earnest youth. Even Catherine Sedgwick, who escaped much of contemporary sternness, sat up all the evening, at the age of eight, to hear her father read Don Quixote or Hudibras.
Throughout the century, Stockbridge's significant men and women fall into three groups: those who attained dis- tinction after they had gone out into the world; those who acquired it while remaining at home; and those who arrived already garlanded. The Fields and the Hopkinses are bracketed in the first category. More than their destiny, a natural affinity links them; plain living, high thinking and a plenitude of ability, set in relief by scarcity of cash. In a fluid society still to be molded by vigorous hands, the American tradition of success could flourish. Ability inevitably rose to the top.
It was with almost a melancholy acceptance of responsi- bility that young Mark Hopkins early realized his own mental powers and wanted a college education. His mother had bequeathed to him the character and capacity of the Curtises; he had inherited the Hopkins mind. He took life so hard that his mother was afraid he would never be entirely happy about anything. When he was thirteen years
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old, his Uncle Sewall asked him to come to Clinton, New York, to help on his farm, where he received board and schooling in return for the labor of his hands.
Life was not all work, however, to Mark's younger brother Albert at the age of nine. "On my coat I have thirty or forty buttons," he wrote, "which make a most brilliant appearance, so that I am daily strutting about in fine style."
Harry, the youngest, inherited the gaiety which life was crushing out of his mother. He was eleven years old and had already attended the school on Elm Street when he wrote to Mark: "Your absence renders it necessary that much of the management of business should fall to the agency of one particularly capable, and although my health has been much impaired yet I rejoice that my uncommon abilities quite makes up the deficiency of health as far as regards business."
Harry's letters are like a sudden streak of sunlight across the bleak New England scene. It was Harry who always knew where the pickerel were to be found, who nearly split his sides laughing when his grandfather fell over a fence, who knew the village gossip, and who liked to dance. "There has been a continual noise and buzying amongst the younger inhabitants for ... the dancing master has again come to town and advertises that he will positively commence his dancing school at Mr. Hicks' . . at two o'clock in the after- noon for ladies and at six in the evening for gentlemen. His terms are . 15 dollars for a family," wrote Mary Hopkins.
Seriousness gained gradually upon Albert, who considered dancing a trifling business and would be quite "in a fit" whenever it interfered with his studies, and wish he had never attended the "dumb dancing school." He liked better the evenings when, after tea, the books were brought out. A table, with candle and spectacles on it, stood before the fire. Seated around it Archibald would pore over the encyclopedia
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until nine o'clock, Harry, the lightweight, would read Plutarch, and Albert, The History of the American Revolu- tion. Albert was sorry that he couldn't spend his evenings working at his Latin and wanted to have a little bag made in which to bring home his books at night. It was difficult to keep up with his brother Mark, however, for Mark could write letters in the Latin tongue.
In those days Williams College was the lodestar for all ambitious young men in western Massachusetts, but its situa- tion was considered remote and at one time there was actually a chance of its being transferred to Stockbridge, which Dr. West's School of Prophets had already established as an intellectual center. Various Berkshire villages bid for the privilege of having it and Stockbridge subscribed the amount of $13,000 while Archibald, though he could ill afford it, gave $100, for he figured it would save him more than that to keep his sons at home while they pursued the higher branches of learning. Finally, however, the authorities decided to keep the university where it was and hopes of Williams for the Hopkins boys had to be temporarily abandoned, for their Uncle John, whose store had been ruined by the Republicans, died, leaving three orphan girls, and without an instant's hesitation, Archibald decided to adopt them. His usual fate had overtaken him. It was a long time before he could bear to tell his son Mark this news-Mark, who had never disap- pointed him in any way. "You must continue to be a good boy and I hope you will make a great man," he had written. Even then there was something unusual about Mark. A visiting cousin, Edwin Welles Dwight, on his way through New York State stopped at the Sewall Hopkins farm, and had been struck by his mental ability.
When, at last, in a semi-illiterate hand, Archibald wrote his son what had happened, the boy showed a disappoint- ment, the maturity of which is seldom encountered at
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seventeen today: "I had rather have a liberal education and nothing else than to have considerable more money than to carry me through, but if you want my help I know that I owe a very great debt and am willing to pay what I can."
There was no way out of the difficulty and Mark had to come home. He soon found, however, that he could teach at a school near by, study for college in his spare time, and pay a hired man to take his place at home. He worked all through vacations along with the other farmers' sons who mingled theology with sawing wood and Latin verbs with milking cows.
Meanwhile, in the village, it was fearful to contemplate the laxness which might overtake Stockbridge if for a moment standards were let down. The heavy teams driving through the village in the War of 1812 had desecrated the Sabbath, and who could tell where such disregard of the Lord's Day would lead? In consequence the Society for the Preservation of Christian Morals was formed. Its constitution reads: "Believing that vice and immorality tend to bring down the judgments of a Righteous Providence . . . we the sub- scribers, for the more effectual suppression of vice and promotion of good morals . . . agree to bind ourselves by the following:
The Members of the Society shall by their conver- sation and example encourage all virtuous conduct, and shall discountenance vice generally; and principally, the vice of Sabbath breaking, intemperance in the use of spirituous liquors and profaneness . . .
"It shall be the duty of each member to furnish the poor, as far as in his power, with the means of employment, that indolence may not betray them into vice . . .
"Any person of a fair moral character may become a member of this Society . . . "
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Unfortunately, the society was on too high a plane for human nature. It was abolished because some people con- sidered that it interfered with the province of the law. Other societies sprang up eagerly in its place, however, all of an aspiring nature. An auxiliary branch of the American Temperance Society was formed in 1826. The County Educational Society, the Berkshire Bible Society, the Sewing Society, tract societies, and societies for the education of young clergymen, trod close upon one another's heels. Various juvenile societies pushed in, too.
The Missionary Society was a favorite one, and it remained for Edwin Welles Dwight, the son of Henry W. Dwight, to introduce a variation on an old Stockbridge theme which went straight to the heart of New England. Before Dr. West's death, Edwin brought Henry Obookiah to call. Edwin was a pious young man and very much the son of his mother, upon whose tombstone were engraved the words:
She brought up children. She lodged strangers. She washed the saints' feet.
She relieved the afflicted.
She diligently followed every good work.
Inclined to priggishness, he considered the discipline at Williams College lax, so he transferred himself to Yale where he studied for the ministry and showed a desire to enlighten the "waste places" of the state. It was in New Haven that he encountered a dark-skinned Hawaiian boy, dull of counten- ance and dressed in sailor's clothes, crying upon the steps of one of the college buildings. The lad explained that he was crying because all the knowledge within was denied him. This extraordinary statement intrigued Edwin, who took the boy home, saw that he was properly cared for and taught him English. From then on Henry Obookiah's tale of stark horror -- he had seen his parents and brother killed before his eyes in the far-away island of "Owyhee"-elicited kindness,
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care, and education from New England ministers. His desire to learn seemed to them almost too good to be true. Along with English and mathematics, they dosed him with piety, which he readily absorbed. While tilling the fields in return for his board and lodging, he wrestled with his soul's wickedness in such real agony that, had he permitted such an ungrateful thought to cross his mind, he must have questioned the kindness of substituting the enduring terrors of eternal damnation for the more fleeting ones of the easy pagan world.
In due course Obookiah was converted and the good ministers' perfect work was done. He was chosen to preach the gospel to his people and his undeniable virtue was a constant reassurance that great work lay ahead in heathen lands. Dressed in a white frilled shirt and an overcoat, and looking rather like an organ-grinder's monkey, his appear- ance at missionary meetings brought in more money than any other appeal. But monkeys are delicate and Obookiah disappointed his benefactors in one respect: he died. Yet even then he was helpful. Edwin Dwight published his memoirs, which went through seventeen editions and was translated into several languages, including Choctaw.
Stockbridge contributed to the Berkshire Missionary Society and even boasted a missionary of its own. Before entering the ministry, Cyrus Byington had studied law with Jahleel Woodbridge. When he first heard of Indian Missions, he declared that his heart caught fire. In 1821, a large baggage wagon, with a basket hung between the seats in which to lay a baby, creaked its way through the village. A company of missionaries were on their way from settled New England to a Georgia wilderness, and Cyrus joined them with the pious books his mother and sister had given him under his arm. Eventually he joined the Choctaw Indians among whom he conducted a mission, which he wistfully called after
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Stockbridge. He translated the Bible into Choctaw for his flock, and they also had their copy of Obookiah's memoirs. Thus Stockbridge was fulfilling the destiny laid down by John Sergeant. Now that everything was becoming civilized, tales of the conquest of heathen souls supplied the element of adventure which was fast being muffled at home.
In 1819, two years before Cyrus Byington started out to take care of his Choctaws, another young minister, who had given up a Connecticut parish to tend the souls of the emigrants on Lake Ontario, obligingly preached several times for the aging Dr. West. The now rickety meeting- house on the Hill seemed almost luxurious to him for he had been riding through the wilderness of New York State preaching in log houses. This young man, David Dudley Field, was so thoroughly orthodox that even the congregation which had been indoctrinated by Dr. West, could find no liberal loophole in his theology, and gave him a formal call.
Not since the War of 1812 had Stockbridge seen such heavily loaded wagons as those that made the journey from Haddam, Connecticut, bringing the new minister's belong- ings. It took them a week to come and return. They were piled high with beds, tables and bureaus and heavy boxes full of books, a wife and six children. On the way in from Great Barrington, the procession turned left at the corner by the Inn, continued down the Plain past the Dwights' house and across the river, past where the Indian boarding school had been, until it unloaded upon a hill where, in a later gener- ation, Charles E. Butler was to build a summer house.
Out of the caravan stepped Submit Dickinson Field, whose youthful figure is hard to detach from the loving bromides her son Henry has placed like funeral wreaths about her. He has awarded her every quality admirable in womankind, yet out of his picture, as out of the lacework of an old-fashioned valentine, comes a very pretty girl, who went gaily about the
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task of taking care of her husband and final family of nine children on $700 a year. There was no New England holier- than-thou attitude about her devotion. One day she told her son Cyrus, "The doctor says I am very ill, but I shall be up tomorrow." It was this spirit rather than the host of virtues heaped gratefully upon her that lay behind the strength of will which enabled her sons to reform American laws and lay the Atlantic cable.
Only two or three months after their arrival, a new Field came into the world. He was tactfully named after two village figures: Cyrus, for Cyrus Williams, one of the new family of Williamses who had come to town, and West for his father's predecessor.
After two or three years, the Fields moved right into the village, just west of Jonathan Edwards's house on the north side of the street, and here the children settled themselves to the business of growing up. To the original quota-David Dudley, Emilia Ann, Timothy Beals, Matthew Dickinson, Jonathan Edwards, Stephen Johnson-were added Cyrus West, Henry Martyn and Mary Elizabeth.
The Fields began each day with prayers. They sat around the fire, their Bibles in their hands, and each took turns reading a piece a day until they got from Genesis to Revela- tions, then started all over again. After this the children who were old enough trouped down to the village school. It was here that Dudley first saw Mark Hopkins. Although the two were somewhat divergent, their backgrounds and their futures met. They were to be friends for life.
The new Stockbridge minister had a loud, ringing voice and an Old-Testament kind of face which his son Cyrus inherited. In his narrow, illumined mind every word of the Bible was directly inspired by God. It was he who estab- lished the Sunrise Meeting, a service held early upon New Year's morning, which became a village institution for over a
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hundred years. Mark Hopkins was tremendously moved by his sermons but there were people who complained that he was old-fashioned and preached at his parishioners. Some of the criticism was perhaps not worth taking seriously, how- ever, since it emanated from that English family, the Ashburners, who had just settled in the town and were inclined to fancy themselves, and from the Pomeroys, who, everyone knew, were Unitarians.
When Dr. Field was not standing at his desk writing his sermons, he was engaged upon preparing A History of the County of Berkshire, a work which goes exhaustively into the geology, flora and fauna as well as the historical achievements of the county. Sometimes a gleam of humor relieved the minister's austerity. When his house burned down and he saw his sermons go up in flames, he remarked, "They give more light to the world than if I had preached them."
Several years after his arrival a crisis arose in the church. A new meetinghouse on the village green was suggested to take the place of the old church, which had never really pleased anyone and now was becoming dilapidated. The Curtisville members of the congregation protested. The extra stretch up Church Street, after the long drive over the meadows, put too great a strain upon even Curtis energy. They wanted a church of their own and Dr. Field was told that a society had been formed which felt it "necessary to be dismissed from the church under your watch and care." The Stockbridge members, on the other hand, did not consider it in the interest of the Redeemer's kingdom to have a church in Curtisville at all. A good deal of bickering went on until a meeting of the clergy of the surrounding towns met to hear both sides of the question.
Not since the days of Lavinia Fisk had the assuaging balm of a council been more needed. This one performed its functions admirably. On the one hand it lamented the fact
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that the Stockbridge members had insisted upon placing the church where their neighbors did not wish it, and on the other hand reproved the members from Curtisville for so abrupt a withdrawal. In the end it was forced, with some reluctance, to let the "aggrieved brethren" have their way.
The council's recommendation was enthusiastically ac- cepted, and sixty-two members of the former Stockbridge church were thereupon incorporated into the North Congre- gational Church at Stockbridge. Money and materials were pledged for a meetinghouse and the seating was arranged along worldly, rather than spiritual, lines. The Curtises and Daniel Fairchild led off with $100-and the best pews. Herman Whittlesey offered two of his finest pines and Lyman Churchill twenty pairs of thick shoes or the equivalent value in boots or shoes of any kind.
After more bickering, a site was chosen and the Reverend Nathan Shaw installed. Sometimes the minister from Stock- bridge would drive over the meadows to preach to the rebellious portion of his flock. He usually took two of his boys up into the pulpit with him, and at the last long prayer would put a hand on each of their sandy heads, "to be sure they were there."
The new Stockbridge church, a fine, red-brick building, unusual enough to catch the eye of the passing young French- man, Beaumont, who made a sketch of it, was dedicated in 1825. It stood only a few rods from the spot where John Ser- geant's meetinghouse had been. Later on, it was painted white and the Ladies' Sewing Society hovered over it, putting in blinds and carpets and chairs and even a "sofa" for the pulpit. Soon after the new church had settled into the landscape, a wave of revivals swept the village. All those anxious for their souls were asked to stand up in their pews. There was such a poor response that the minister decided a feud in the village prevented a more abundant stirring of the spirit.
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Up at Cherry Cottage, Harry Hopkins cast a skeptical modern eye upon the revivals. In vain his brothers begged him to become converted. Albert was sure he stood a chance of having his soul burned in the very center of hell. Mark, too, was troubled. They had both pursued their own chosen careers while Harry had stayed at home to look after the farm. Yet his radiantly unselfish nature was to them no guarantee of salvation, and saving one's soul for the next world remained the most important concern of this.
Gradually, however, Mark worked out of his earlier religious narrowness and came to a compromise with the more tolerant conceptions of the nineteenth century. He established a halfway station between Jonathan Edwards and Channing, where men and women could nourish a reason- able hope of salvation, beside a passionate belief in a personal God.
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